LAREDO, Tex. — Priscilla Villarreal roams the streets of Laredo in an old Dodge pickup, scrambling to drug busts and murder scenes to bring her tales from the dark side of the southwest border to her many viewers.

Rappers celebrate her scoops, proclaiming that “she gets more love than our own city’s mayor.”

“I guess this makes me famous, huh?” said Ms. Villarreal, 34, a 10th-grade dropout with a shaved head, an abundance of tattoos and an impassioned 119,000-strong following on Facebook. She is arguably the most influential journalist in Laredo, a border city of 260,000.

Reporting in profanity-laced Spanglish and calling herself La Gordiloca, which roughly translates as the Crazy Fat Lady, Ms. Villarreal’s swift rise to prominence reflects how many people on the border now prefer to get their news — and just maybe, provides a glimpse at the future of journalism.

All the notoriety amounts to a big shift for Ms. Villarreal. Just a few years ago she was working part time for a wrecking crew removing scrap from tractor-trailer crash sites. She was struggling with depression and post-traumatic stress after losing a baby born prematurely.

But Ms. Villarreal embarked on a second career in muckraking in 2015. She has held local officials accountable — emerging victorious from a caustic legal battle with the Laredo Police Department over press freedom — and unearthed stories that were not being told.

“News on the Move,” she calls it.

Fans stop her on the street now to ask for autographs or selfies; Laredo eateries hire her to advertise their cuisine.

“She’s already something of a folk hero down there,” said Daxton Stewart, a journalism professor specializing in media law at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “What’s fascinating is that she’s doing it the old-fashioned way, but with new technologies, by breaking news the authorities just don’t want out there.”

Her recent reports include a horrific case of child abuse (“Teenagers having babies!!” she opined), the arrest of a school superintendent in Waco for possession of marijuana (“Let’s all do a petition for him in Laredo so he won’t lose his job!!”), drug raids and messy tractor-trailer accidents.

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Ms. Villarreal goes live on Facebook from the scene of an overturned tractor-trailer.

CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

Ms. Villarreal reports entirely on Facebook, often by live-streaming video on her page on her iPhone. Some follow her because of her fire-breathing reporting style, blending facts with chisme (gossip), but many in Laredo welcome her exposés on public corruption in a city whose abundant reports of graft are the target of an F.B.I. investigation.

In February, for instance, she scooped the competition with a report about a former Laredo police investigator who was accused of taking gambling proceeds from raids on slot-machine casinos, then was allowed to resign when confronted with the findings.

It took days for competitors to finally catch up and get the story about Anthony Carrillo Jr., 47, a 26-year veteran of the police force, when he was charged with tampering with evidence and abuse of his official capacity.

Laredo police officers arrested Ms. Villarreal in December 2017 and charged her with two counts of misuse of official information, a third-degree felony. They said the charges were in connection with her reporting on the 2017 suicide of a Customs and Border Protection supervisor, whose name Ms. Villarreal published.

For months before her arrest, the police department had also been hunting down the source of other leaks to Ms. Villarreal. They identified a police officer suspected of supplying the information — a woman who had worked on the force for 19 years — after searching the officer’s phone and finding hundreds of calls exchanged with Ms. Villarreal.

The department placed the officer on suspension for 20 days and said in a statement that the case against Ms. Villarreal involved an “obligation to the protection of a person’s right to privacy as it relates to sensitive information.”

The district judge who examined the case promptly dismissed the charges against Ms. Villarreal, but the legal battle left her with mixed feelings about her work.

“The case made me even more well-known in Laredo, and more sources talk to me now,” she said. “But I remain scared, and who I’m most scared of here aren’t the criminals or smugglers. It’s the Laredo Police Department.”

Without editors to review her work, Ms. Villarreal reports almost entirely on her own. The only person who occasionally helps her monitor developments in Laredo is her mother, Maricela Rodríguez, 55, a former migrant worker who used to harvest sugar beets in Minnesota to support her family.

“I'm still learning how to say things like ‘allegedly’ or ‘it’s being said’ when I’m describing breaking news,” Ms. Villarreal said. “It’s a challenge, because I speak the language of the streets, and that’s why people follow me.”

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Ms. Villarreal, seated, greets her fans Hilda Peña, 72, left, and Maricela Rodriguez, 64, at a restaurant in Laredo.CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

As newspapers in this part of Texas cut staff and resources for reporting, Ms. Villarreal is pressing ahead. She makes a small amount of money by promoting restaurants she frequents, though it is not enough to replace her 1998 Dodge Ram truck, which she bought used for $700 and affectionately calls her Blue Demon.

“For some reason, I find reporting therapeutic,” said Ms. Villarreal, describing her severe depression after losing her baby a decade ago. She said she gained about 100 pounds after the loss, and tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrist.

One part of the job that she dislikes, Ms. Villarreal said, is what she calls “my haters.” Some go on her Facebook page and mock her appearance or her demeanor. Others express disgust at all her swearing. Indeed, many of her reports would have trouble finding their way into the pages of a family newspaper.

“Every other word out of her mouth is obscene,” said Abundio Rene Cantú, a lawyer for a Laredo day care center that sued Ms. Villarreal for defamation after she reported that children at the site were being mistreated. Ms. Villarreal is appealing an initial ruling against her.

“This is a woman who has no respect for the rule of law, or due process,” Mr. Cantú said. “I feel she is a danger to this community because she interferes with law enforcement.”

When Ms. Villarreal recently declared opposition to President Trump and his plans for a border wall, some conservatives in Laredo questioned whether she was an undocumented immigrant. (Ms. Villarreal’s grandparents are from Mexico and she was born in the United States.)

Most days, she pays her detractors little heed. On a recent day, she prowled the city in the Blue Demon, cranking up the volume as she sang along with Tejano bands like Siggno.

Stopping for lunch a short stroll from the border, at the La Posada Hotel, Ms. Villareal was quickly recognized. Some diners stopped to give her a hug and express best wishes about a new revelation: Ms. Villarreal is pregnant. Others lined up to take selfies with her.

“I’m one of your top fans,” Hilda Peña, 72, told Ms. Villarreal after wandering over to take a photograph with her. Ms. Peña, a retired financial services administrator, said that Ms. Villarreal won her over last year with her reporting on Juan David Ortiz, the Border Patrol agent accused of killing several women in Laredo. (According to investigators, he has confessed to four killings; he has pleaded not guilty.)

“With that serial killer on the loose, I wondered if I should get my gun,” Ms. Peña said. “But La Gordiloca made it clear when the situation was under control.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Muckraker on the Border Who Reports From a ’98 Dodge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe